My Weekend Project: Preparing For Next Year’s Garden

It’s never too early to start planning for next year’s garden, especially if you do not use conventional fertilizers.

We spent the weekend cleaning out the barn, and preparing a new garden spot for next year.

We currently have our main garden at our other farm, about 5 miles done the road, so we wanted one here too.

To do this we decided to “lay out” the garden spot by taking tall field grass that we bush hogged, and putting it in the shape we wanted the garden spot.

This is a pic that was taken while we were still spreading it. This was a couple of weeks ago. We let it set on the area for weeks to kill off the grass underneath, while at the same time adding nutrients into our soil.

After the couple of weeks we burnt the dead grass to clean up the area for plowing, as well as increase the nutrients in the soil further. (This was this weekend)

Fluff up the dead grass to allow it to burn easier.

Start the fire on each side, and watch it carefully to avoid it spreading.

It is also important to stay with the fire a it burns to keep it under control. A pitchfork works well for this.

Once it has all burnt down it looks like this.

Now it is ready to plow.

After the garden bed is plowed, you can till the garden.

Once this is all finished, just sprinkle the tilled garden bed with high magnesium lime, and you re good to go.

We will work compost into it at some time before garden planting.

This is an easy way to get the garden area ready, and healthy for next spring.

Or fall garden is at the old farm, so we will be tending it…hopefully we will get some goodies 🙂